A blog from the Khan Academy Computing team. We'll post on what we've released, what we're working on, and what we learn as we go along.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Programming Avatars

An extremely common request amongst students was for the addition of programming-themed avatars! All students can change their personal avatar in their profile. Until now the only avatars available were generic in nature, not relating to any curriculum.

Inside the Computer Science curriculum we have a few recurring characters that the students have fallen in love with: Winston (introduced by Jessica Liu), Hopper (introduced in the first coding challenge), and Oh Noes, the Error Buddy (who pops up on every error).

All of these characters have been turned into avatars for Computer Science students to enjoy! However, there's a catch: students must first complete a number of different tasks within the CS curriculum in order to unlock the avatars. The full list of the required accomplishments can be found here:

Unlocking avatars is something new to Khan Academy, before now you had to receive a number of energy points in order to unlock an avatar. Having this new incentive-driven model is exciting for both the students and the teachers. We're curious to see if this has a positive impact on students exploring the site and curriculum!